The topic about favorite openings inspired me to start this topic. Coming of Age in Mississippi is the autobiography of Anne Moody, an African-American girl/woman (she grows up during the book) who fought for civil rights. The last five words are: "I wonder. I really wonder." Because at that point she doesn't know if the Civil Rights Movement will be successful. The book doesn't specify what year it ends in. Although she isn't famous, Anne wrote that she got on a list of people the Ku Klux Klan considered to be troublemakers. I read the book in college in Spring 2006. For more information, go to http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/coming-of-age-in-mississippi-moody/1101869302?ean=9780440314882
First rate book. Glad to see it is still being read. Her passage on King's "I Have a Dream" speech was quite enlightening to a white kid who had grown up swaddled in the myth of MLK.
My favorite ending line is from Frank Herbert's Dune: Lady Jessica to Chani, "History will call us wives".
"... and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom." Watership Down
Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it. It, Stephen King
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." Animal Farm George Orwell
"It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." Moby Dick - Herman Melville
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html is "Lamb To The Slaughter," a short story by Roald Dahl I read in the 2000-2001 school year. A woman murders her husband by hitting him with hard, frozen lamb meat. Then she calls the police, tells them she found her husband dead, and offered the police dinner so they would eat the evidence. The last three lines are: " "Personally, I think it's right here on the premises." "Probably right under our very noses. What you think, Jack?" And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle. " The second of those lines uses a figurative expression that in this case is literally true.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
“‘My, my. A body does get around. Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee.’" Light in August - William Faulkner
A couple of short stories come to mind . . . From "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," right after Granny has had last rites and as she dies, now destined for hell as an unrepentant and unforgiven sinner: For a second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more cruel than this – I’ll never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light. From "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," following an amazing escape from a prisoner being hung from the bridge during the Civil War: He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forwards with extended arms. As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon -- then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Fahrquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
Willa Cather's Lucy Gayheart When he came out of the house the last intense light of the winter day was pouring over the town below him, and the bushy tree-tops and the church steeples gleamed like copper. After all, he was thinking, he would never go away from Haverford; he had been through too much here ever to quit the place for good. What was a man`s "home town," anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments and had learned to bear them? As he was leaving the Gayhearts', he paused mechanically on the sidewalk, as he had done so many thousand times, to look at the three light footprints, running away.
No mention of Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" yet? He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.
Damn, some excellent ones here and all that comes to mind for me is: "and they lived happily ever after."
I saw a short movie of this in B&W a long way back. In the movie the rope breaks and you see him going home to meet his wife. But you know he didn't really.
a very good thread. to be read a book needs a good opening, but to be remembered as great it needs a great ending. and here are a couple such: James Joyce's Ulysses ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they don’t know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the Jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharans and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time I now understood why the Duc de Guermantes, whom I had admired, seeing him seated on a chair, as having so little aged in spite of having so many more years under him than I, had tottered so when he rose and tried to stand erect - his wobbly legs like those of an old archbishop surrounded by seminarians, whose only solid part is his metal cross - and had moved, trembling like a leaf, on the forbidding summit of his eighty-three years, as though men were perched upon living stilts which keep on growing, reaching the height of steeples, until walking becomes difficult and dangerous and, at last, they fall. I was terrified that mine were already so high beneath me, and did not think myself strong enough to long retain a past that went back so far, and that I bore within me so painfully! If only time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which has imposed itself upon me with such force today, and I would therein describe men, though it make them seem monstrous beings, as occupying a place in Time far more considerable than that to which they are restricted in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably, since they touch, simultaneously, the distant periods through which they have lived - between which so many days have ranged themselves – immersed, like giants, in Time. (the above translation started out as hudson's (the only one available online) but it's so ghastly i didn't dare present it without reworking it a bit. Here is the original. Je venais de comprendre pourquoi le duc de Guermantes, dont j’avais admiré, en le regardant assis sur une chaise, combien il avait peu vieilli bien qu’il eût tellement plus d’années que moi au-dessous de lui, dès qu’il s’était levé et avait voulu se tenir debout, avait vacillé sur des jambes flageolantes comme celles de ces vieux archevêques sur lesquels il n’y a de solide que leur croix métallique et vers lesquels s’empressent les jeunes séminaristes, et ne s’était avancé qu’en tremblant comme une feuille sur le sommet peu praticable de quatre-vingt-trois années, comme si les hommes étaient juchés sur de vivantes échasses grandissant sans cesse, parfois plus hautes que des clochers, finissant par leur rendre la marche difficile et périlleuse, et d’où tout d’un coup ils tombent. Je m’effrayais que les miennes fussent déjà si hautes sous mes pas, il ne me semblait pas que j’aurais encore la force de maintenir longtemps attaché à moi ce passé qui descendait déjà si loin, et que je portais si douloureusement en moi ! Si du moins il m’était laissé assez de temps pour accomplir mon oeuvre, je ne manquerais pas de la marquer au sceau de ce Temps dont l’idée s’imposait à moi avec tant de force aujourd’hui, et j’y décrirais les hommes, cela dût-il les faire ressembler à des êtres monstrueux, comme occupant dans le Temps une place autrement considérable que celle si restreinte qui leur est réservée dans l’espace, une place, au contraire, prolongée sans mesure, puisqu’ils touchent simultanément, comme des géants, plongés dans les années, à des époques vécues par eux, si distantes – entre lesquelles tant de jours sont venus se placer – dans le Temps.